Saturday, January 21, 2012
 

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Monday, January 16, 2012

I find it interesting how much I missed over a year, especially those "big" news stories that just whizzed right past me. Looking over the "year in review" style articles is a way to find out if I was paying attention:

• Boing Boing's top posts of 2011
• Our ten most-read posts of 2011 on AMERICAblog
• While we're at it, let's take a look at the century in retrospect: 100 Years Of Significant Events In 10 Minutes

Science and Tech:

• An interesting question: Did the Mammoth Extinction Warm the Earth?
• Coming to North America during the ice age: Was the New World Settled Twice?
• So far, its been a weird winter. It will stay weird: La Niña Into Spring | Weather Predictions
• I like the way a good InfoGraphic can show you things clearly: Tallest Mountain to Deepest Ocean Trench
• The continuing mysteries of global extinctions: Did Mercury Cause Permian Extinctions?
• I already have moose, deer, elk, bear and Harley Bikers wandering around my town: will this help? Scientists Close to Reviving Wooly Mammoths From Extinction
• Instead of yet another rehashed alarmist view of the Yellowstone Caldera, finally, people are talking about a different volcanic apocalypse: Is a super-volcano at Laacher See lake in Germany about to blow?
• Fracking is a mess, as disaster, a huge stinking turd of a way to get natural gas, and a 4.0 Earthquake Caused by Fracking in Ohio Was Felt in Tornonto. And just in case you wonder what Fracking does to your water quality, take a gander at the glass of Post-Fracking well water pictured here to the right.
• The Black Death rears its ugly head -- again -- in another article: Is the Black Death the Ancestor of All Modern Plagues?
• Very pretty -- and very close-up -- Pictures of sand
• How a single fragment of bone changed the entire picture of Hominid ancestry: Denisova | john hawks weblog
• A common additive in America is outlawed everywhere else in the world, for good reason: Is That Flame Retardant In Your Soft Drink?
• Materials science is transforming our world: Researchers hack silkworm genome to get spidery silk for fabrics that will beat everything out there for strength and light weight -- until graphene fabrics become  commonly available.
• Metals are interesting: sometimes making a part out of a single crystal is great, for jet turbine blades, for example they use Single Crystal Superalloys. But sometimes it's better to use metals with zero crystalline structure, which gives us Metals That Can Be Molded Like Plastics.

Modern life:

• Working security at the nation's airports, for $8 an hour, no sick days, and no health insurance. Air Safety on the Cheap
• Go to an "Occupy" protest, get arrested. Listen in jaw-dropping amazement as the City Attorney says: "pay for brainwashing lessons on limits of free speech and we'll drop the charges."
• What the government is developing to use against civilian populations: The Military's Freakiest 'Non-Lethal' Weapon Ideas
• But with guys like this, why bother with "Non-Lethal?" Just shoot them, one at a time, from over 1,000 yards. With 160 kills, Navy SEAL is America’s deadliest sniper.
• Police thuggery strikes again: Florida deputies cleared of wrongdoing in unusual death
• Bank thuggery strikes again: How Mastercard and Visa rip off merchants with secret, 1,000-page "agreement"

Life in America:

• Democrats make a perfectly reasonable suggestion to Republicans who want to test jobless citizens: how about "YOU Pee In The Cup?"
• "Privatize" the juvenile justice system, get shocking corruption and abuse of minors: Pa. judge dismisses 2,000 juvenile cases in 'kids for cash' scandal
• Obama the Tyrannical: how dare he? Santorum upset that Obama wants an educated America
• Colbert is turning this big, huge mess of a complicated scandal into neat, funny -- and very effective -- PAC commercials of his own: Colbert Super-PAC ad: Buddy Roemer does not coordinate with Colbert Super-PAC

Living well:

• On less: Handcrafted Yurts, Tipis and Tents for mobile life, or Tiny Homes for staying put (if you want.)
• You don't need super-advanced alien technology. You just need to stop driving giant, heavy SUV Suburban Assault Tanks to the grocery store: This Tiny Car from 1953 Got 50+ mpg (And Cary Grant Loved It.) You could consider the new Prius C, for example. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the  Volkswagen 282 MPG car would sure be hard to beat. And in the back window, paste some of these "My Monster Family" car stickers.
• Still too expensive, but getting there: Sous Vide Supreme.

Classical Music:

• Someone sold a violin. The buyer complained, and PayPal said "to get a refund, Destroy The Violin." Yes, really. From the Mailbag
• The test that has everyone talking: Double-Blind Violin Test: Can You Pick The Strad?
• The Carnegie Hall "National Youth Orchestra" is accepting video auditions. If I were between 16 and 19, I'd go for it: Attention, Teenage Orchestral Musicians: Here's Your Big Chance.

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Monday, January 2, 2012

Happy New Year, everyone.

Let's start off with good news: finally, after some years of waiting, the Volkswagen 282 MPG car will be produced -- in limited edition, for somewhere between $31k and $47k. Pro: it gets 282 mpg. Con: it's small. They call it the "One Liter" car because it burns one liter of diesel it its little 2-cylinder engine per 100 kilometers.

On the other end of the spectrum, VW makes a 4.7 Liter behemoth that is actually an armored car, if you'd like to safely cruise the streets of the Top 100 most dangerous places to live in the USA in German uber-techno style. If your a 1%-er who'd like to cruise around in anonymous excessive luxury, you could buy one of the new stealth Ultra-posh Sprinter vans so you can sip Dom Perignon and eat caviar while looking like a delivery van. (Note to the 1%; the super-gleaming black versions with tinted windows and liveried chauffeur are a dead giveaway.) Personally, I'd choose the "One Liter Car" and move to one of The Healthiest Places to Live, and eat lots of Fish to Keep Your Brain Working, and cook perfect blinis and possibly Turkey on the barbecue.

Hopefully, no matter where you live, you don't have Mysterious 13-pound metal spheres 3.6 feet in diameter falling on you from space, as they do Namibia. (And "commonly throughout the southern hemisphere" ?!?)

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Not as radical as it sounds: We need to design a new economic order. And it's true: our current economic environment rewards the rape of the environment, heavily-polluting industries, the destruction of communities, unconscionably bad treatment of working citizens, outrageous profiteering from the pain and suffering of Americans, and general Bad Behavior. And it also, by the way, richly rewards Going To War.

It's not like we need to invent a whole new economic model: the "Economic Climate" is the result of very specific regulations, rules and policies, put into place over decades of tinkering, steered with absolute deliberation by the people who have the most influence over regulators and policy-makers. We could have an "Economic Climate" that favors peace over war, small business over large, working class Americans over Corporate Boards, clean industry over dirty, land stewardship over environmental rape, long-term prosperity over boom-and-bust, living wages over slave wages, and humane treatment of citizens over brutality.

This is very, very simple, folks. It's all in the rules, regulations and policies. It doesn't take a re-write of the constitution, a "new world order," an overthrow of the government or an invasion of Space Aliens. It's very, very simple: just comb through the massive, crushing weight of rules, regulations and policies, review every single damn one of them, and rewrite them to favor the health and well-being of the people and the planet, instead of favoring the Profit and Power of the VERY FEW.

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History:

• Universe Had 10 Dimernsions at Big Bang
• It's got 16,000 eyes on you: Cambrian-era predator
• Climate Change Triggered Rise & Fall of Six Waves of Mammalian Species Over Past 65-Million Years
• Asian Ancestors Had Sex with ... Denisovans!!!
• No. Nobody found Mayan ruins in Georgia

The Economy: (news for people who work for a living)

• Debtors Prisons return to America: Unpaid Bills Land Debtors Behind Bars
• banking: kid with $4.85 in his account gets charged $234.95 in fees in two weeks
• I hadn't heard about this case before, but it's very disturbing: Jeff Baron Case Summary

Health and Medicine:

• Read How Doctors Die. It's important.

Techno:

• Space Planes, Psyops, Secret Prisons: 9 Secret Military Programs
• American Concept Cars Showcase, Part 2
• Luigi Colani Radical Designs Update
• A carbon fibre violin made from scratch

Law weirdness:

• The scandal of the Alabama poor cut off from water
• Judge hits blogger with $2.5 million fine for not being a journalist
• In futile car search for drugs, Pompton Lakes police inflict $12K worth of damage
• ACLU fights Kafkaesque secret Occupy Boston Twitter subpoena

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